THE MOON HOAX

by Donald E. Simanek

Sir William Herschel (1738-1822) was a first rate astronomer. He and his
sister Caroline catalogued star clusters and nebulae, discovering new satellites
of Saturn, and they also discovered the planet Uranus.

But Herschel was prone to speculate beyond the facts, and he was convinced
by a shaky argument from analogy, that all stars and planets have intelligent
life. In his own words, "they are well supplied with inhabitants." He even
went so far as to conclude that our sun is inhabited, that the hot surface
we observe is only a thin shell around a cooler surface within which life
could exist.

John Herschel

Herschel remained convinced of the existence of his "sun men" up to his death
in 1822.

William Herschel's son, John, also became a respected astronomer. In the
year 1835 John was in Feldhausen, South Africa, where he built a telescope
to take advantage of the clearer air there and to see portions of the southern
sky not visible at northern latitudes.

In this year the New York Sun newspaper published, in instalment form,
an alleged reprint account of John Herschel's discoveries in South Africa.
The articles cited as their source, the Edinburgh Journal of Science,
which had in fact been defunct for some years.

John Herschel's 20 foot telescope at Feldhausen, S.
A.

The articles created a sensation, for they told of Herschel's discovery of
life on the moon. They described in detail his invention of a special system
which magnified so greatly that one could observe the moon's surface as if
one were standing on it. (Negative considerations like limits of resolution
and atmospheric turbulence weren't mentioned.)

As the installments unfolded, this marvelous telescope observed the moon's
craters, amethyst crystals 90 feet high, rivers, vegetation and animals,
curly-antletered antelope, goats, cranes, pelicans, bison with eye-flaps
of skin to shield their eyes from the sun, and tailless beaver.

Moon men and other creatures.
1835 lithograph. [The Bettmann Archive]

Finally, the series revealed the discovery of moon men. They were furry,
winged men and women, resembling bats, and could fly. Herschel was quoted,
describing these creatures in full detail.

This was one of the most famous newspaper hoaxes in history. It even fooled
some scientists. Two scientists from Yale couldn't find the original
Edinburgh Journal articles in the Yale library. So they traveled to
New York to obtain them from the newspaper's office. They were told the articles
were at the printers. A newspaper runner took another route to the printing
plant and told the printer where to send them next. They were given the royal
runaround all day, and went back to Yale disappointed and none the wiser.

John Herschel, still in South Africa, finally heard of the hoax by letter,
and thought it amusing, saying, "It is too bad my real discoveries here won't
be that exciting."

But after a while he began to complain, "I have been pestered from all quarters
with that ridiculous hoax about the Moonin English French Italian &
German!"

Title page of pamphlet reprint,
showing moon men and hut-dwelling bipedal beavers.

This hoax fooled so many people that it is easy to lose sight of its original
target. The whole story was written by Richard Adams Locke, aggressive editor
of the Sun, which was then a young, four-page daily paper sold for a penny
a copy. The target of his satire was Dr. Thomas Dick, a writer of popular
scientific books. Dick had a style which combined some scientific fact with
fantastic speculation, wild theory, and moral preaching. Dick's books about
the moon assumed, without proof, that the moon was inhabited, and went on
to discuss how we might send signals and communicate with those inhabitants.
The physicist-mathematician Gauss made similar proposals.

Locke was satirizing such pompous theorizing and extravagant writing. He
succeeded all too well, and had to admit to friends that he never imagined
how many people would be taken in, and said that he was "the best self-hoaxed
man" in the community.

The name Gotham, a nickname for New York City, derives from the name
of a mythical "land of fools". New York City had a reputation in the 19th
century as being a place where suckers were ripe for picking. Since then
this tradition of gullibility has spread over the entire country, and is
now centered somewhere in California.